A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,67

the hunt was off now; there is no stopping a khern stampede except the will of the kherns themselves. The only thing my family could do was run. It was the only thing I could do, too.

I turned ninety degrees and headed straight east, hoping to get out of the path of the kherns and let them pass me by. Outrunning them would be impossible.

There were dozens of the gray-skinned behemoths—perhaps more than a hundred beasts spread out and churning the earth, snorting and trumpeting and running full speed, heads lowered, their great black curved horns thrust forward and ready to ram anything, including our wagon and the wart yaks tied up to them.

Wart yaks stand six feet tall at the shoulder, and their horns are dangerous. But though they’re strong and sturdy, they’re not particularly fast. And they’re half as tall as a khern, less than half the weight, and far less than half as fast. I didn’t think they stood a chance of surviving the charge of the kherns. What chance, then, did my family have?

They ran to the sides, as I did, to try to beat the edge before it overwhelmed them. But they had been on the other side of the wagon—my uncle’s family ran in the opposite direction from me. But Mother jumped down to run in my direction, perhaps to warn me, because I saw her waving her arms over my shoulder as I ran. Father came after her, climbing over the wagon and doing his best to catch up, but they were far closer to the boil than I was. I saw the wart yaks begin to panic, saw the twelve-foot-high wall of horn and meat thunder closer, saw my mother open her mouth in a scream I never heard over the rumble of the kherns, saw her see me looking back at her as I ran, and she reached out to me, mouthing my name and something more as she realized she would never make it, my father behind her, shouting as well, and then my parents disappeared under the boil of kherns, the wart yaks were plowed under, the wagon splintered into pieces and got chewed up by the stampede, and it came for me, growing larger, quaking the earth beneath my feet. I hardly had breath to make noise, but I did, limbs pumping as fast as I could make them, my field bag flapping madly in my wake and tears leaking out of my eyes as I ran for my life. And I wasn’t alone: other creatures in the path of the boil were flying if they could or running to get out of the way—a stalk hawk, a covey of gharel hens, a saw-beaked owl taking wing in the daylight, plus rodents and serpents and lizards scrambling through the grass.

I cleared the edge of the boil by no more than a couple of lengths, the turbulence of the last khern’s passage knocking me off my feet. For a moment I expected to be trampled anyway, but the beasts kept going, and I struggled upright on shaky legs to get my bearings.

The boil was far broader than it was deep. It had flattened out in response to the pursuit of a sedge of grass pumas, perhaps ten of them anxious to make one of the kherns go down and then prevent it from ever gaining its feet again. Most of them stopped and converged on the wart yaks; that was the way they operated sometimes, never bringing down a khern but taking advantage of whatever the kherns brought down in their stampede. But of course the wart yaks weren’t the only victims. The grass was flattened where the kherns had passed, and so I could see them, broken and crushed and smeared on the plains because of me, when not five minutes ago I had told them that I loved them all—

I don’t think I ever made noises like I made right then. Whimpers at first and then a long, sustained cry of denial when I could catch breath enough to voice it. That cry drew attention, however. One of the pumas was having trouble getting its fair share of yak meat with all the others crowding around, and it looked up with interest while all the others were feeding. It decided I looked delicious and easy to catch and arrowed through the grass in my direction.

There was no outrunning it. It was coming specifically for me, and for